A Prince of Pork

By R. W. APPLE Jr.

Published: May 17, 2006

THEY hang inconspicuously behind glass windows just inside the front door of Salumi, a pipsqueak of a place in the shabby Pioneer Square neighborhood of downtown Seattle. Hunks of ruddy-colored meat a little smaller than footballs, trussed with heavy twine, they are easy to miss amid the familiar prosciuttos, salamis and provolone cheeses.

But you miss them at your peril. They are princes among pork products, known in northern Italy as the superstars of the antipasto platter, and coveted by generations of big-time eaters in Emilia-Romagna, which harbors more of that species than any other Italian region. Sweeter, mellower and more delicate in flavor than prosciutto, with an astoundingly smooth and creamy texture, these ?-hams, called culatelli, have achieved something approaching mythic status among the few Americans lucky enough to have tasted them on their native ground in the foggy Po River lowlands near Parma.

Until recently, that was just about the only place to taste the genuine article -- either at the kitchen table of a hospitable farmhouse or at a traditional salumeria like the 400-year-old Giusti in Modena or at rural trattorias like the incomparable Da Ivan in Fontanelle and La Buca in Zibello, the epicenter of the culatello world.

Cut tissue-thin on a circular electric slicer, the meat looks ''as subtle as rose-tinted parchment,'' Burton Anderson exclaims in ''Treasures of the Italian Table'' (William Morrow, 1994). It tastes even better. When made according to traditional precepts rather than by newfangled industrial methods, the locals say, it is caviar and the rest of the stuff is only fish eggs.

Now properly cured culatello has arrived at last in the United States, courtesy of a cheerful artisan named Armandino Batali, the proprietor of Salumi, where he makes, sells and serves it, plus other piggy treats like fennel-flavored salami and smoky soppressata.

Mr. Batali, 68, learned the pork-preserving craft in Italy after retiring from Boeing, where he worked as a chemical engineer. Among his best customers is his son Mario, the ebullient proprietor of Babbo, Lupa, Esca and other Manhattan caravansaries.

It takes a year or so to make a culatello, and that makes it expensive. At Salumi, which consists of a long service counter and a few chairs and tables, with old black-and-white family photos on the walls and an ultramodern processing plant out back, most of the salamis cost $15 a pound; culatello is $35 a pound, and worth every cent.

With his longish silver hair tucked inside a black baseball cap, eyes dancing with good humor behind dark-rimmed glasses, Mr. Batali welcomed a group of us to his little domain one day recently with the jolly comment: ''Fat is beautiful. Fat is our friend.''

He led the way to his private hideaway, a small dining room furnished with nondescript chairs and a long table covered with oilcloth, sat down at one end and poured out tumblers full of chilled lambrusco -- not the syrupy plonk popular with the Mateus crowd in the 1970's, but a bone-dry, biodynamic 2004 La Luna from Cantine Ceci in a handsome bottle whose cork was held down by a ''muzzle'' of string.

Garnet-colored, almost black, it foamed when it splashed into the glasses, then subsided, leaving behind a ring of pinkish froth. They swear by dry lambrusco in the trattorias of Emilia, where it is made, drinking it with almost everything. But it goes especially well with cured meats and cheese, its fruity acidity cutting through the fat, in the words of David Lynch, Babbo's wine director, ''like a chainsaw through wood.''

It certainly irrigated our late lunch perfectly. Nancy Leson, the well-informed restaurant critic of The Seattle Times; Dan Barber, the chef at Blue Hill in Greenwich Village and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills in Westchester County, north of New York City; my wife, Betsey; and I worked our way happily through plates of spicy boar sausage, coppa (a rough-cut sausage made from the collar of the pig), lamb prosciutto (not my favorite), cotechino sausage with exceptional Washington state lentils and an ambrosial family-style white bean and escarole soup.

But the purpose of the exercise, of course, was to taste the culatello, waiting prettily on a white platter, alongside another dish laden with puffy squares of crisply fried bread dough known as gnocchi fritti.

Mr. Batali is the least boastful of men, but he told me, ''I believe my culatello is as good as anything in the Po.'' Compared with the Italian originals, his hams are a little smaller, more spherical and less pear-shaped, and rimmed with a significantly broader band of glacier-white fat.

He makes about 30 culatelli a month, he said, out of a total of 2,500 pounds of cured meat. Having begun with meat from Oregon, he now uses pork from white-hoofed Berkshire hogs raised by Doug Metzger, a third-generation farmer, on a 1,500-acre spread near Seneca, Kan. They are free to root and range as they like and are fed alfalfa and soybean meal with no hormones or additives. Naturally, the meat is free of the nasty water injections industrial outfits use.